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Art

How to Make a Movie About a Writer

October 15, 2009

Yesterday I saw Jane Campion’s movie “Bright Star,” about the doomed romance between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and I liked it very much. How could I not like it? The romantic hero is a writer. You don’t see that very often.

Writers make bad film protagonists because the real work of writing is unfilmable. A writer at work is doing nothing more picturesque than scribbling on a pad or, worse, staring into space. The “action,” such as it is, takes place in his mind. So the struggle to create has to be extroverted, acted out: the writer balls up a piece of paper and flings it across the room in frustration. Personally, I have never balled up a manuscript page and flung it across the room. I work on a computer. Most writers do now, which should spell doom for this particular film cliché, a blessing for which we should all be thankful.

There are good movies about writers, of course, but they are generally not about the work itself. Successful writer movies — “Capote,” for example — include virtually none of their subjects’ actual prose. They are not about what’s inside the books; they are about the struggle to make the books.

This is why “Bright Star” is such an exceptional writer movie. Keats’s poetry is a constant presence in the film. It is read aloud by characters within scenes and in voice-over. The end credits alone, in which the actor Ben Whishaw reads the “Ode to a Nightingale” in its entirety, is worth the price of the ticket. Keats’s letters, too, are woven into the dialogue. The film is about a mood, and it is the same mood that Keats’s poetry captures so well — gloom, melancholy, languor, longing. The movie and the poems are written in the same key, so the poetry actually enhances the film just as the usual movie devices do, cinematography, music, and so on.

It is surprising that there are so few movies about poets. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single one. But poetry and film work well together. E. L. Doctorow has written,

Film de-literates thought; it relies primarily on an association of visual impressions or understandings. Moviegoing is an act of inference. You receive what you see as a broad band of sensual effects that evoke your intuitive nonverbal intelligence. You understand what you see without having to think it through with words.

Yes, all right, it is a visual medium. But poetry does something similar. It “literates” emotion, it evokes moods without ever quite naming them. Sometimes it describes states of mind that have no name, that never coalesce into definite thoughts, and therefore can’t be thought through, only felt. You can understand a poem without quite being able to put its meaning into words.

At several points “Bright Star” seems about to tip over into preciousness, as so many period costume dramas do. Ben Whishaw, as Keats, is delicate looking. He stares dreamily at flowers or coughs with tuberculosis. (It is really Fanny’s movie. If there is any justice, the role will make a star out of Abbie Cornish.) What makes him affecting is the poems. No wonder Fanny fell for him — he’s John Keats. Whatever flaws the movie may have, I can’t think of any other that incorporates a writer’s actual words so much and so well.

Filed Under: Keepers, Movies, Poetry, Writers Tagged With: Jane Campion, John Keats

Vermeer

October 4, 2009

Vermeer - Milkmaid

The effort to rival his best works, which was out of the question for anyone else, must have tormented Vermeer, whose self-generated standards demanded a labor-intensiveness scarcely convenient for a father of eleven, working in the middling genre of domestic interiors. Most of his Dutch peers averaged fifty or so pictures a year; Vermeer clocked in with two or three …

Vermeer was about twenty-five when he painted “The Milkmaid.” That’s hard to deal with. What made him so precocious? I hazard that it was the locomotive logic of a simple stylistic idea: to recast conventional genre painting in the terms of a perceptual realism as thoroughgoing as the medium allowed. The conviction of reality that flooded his canvases extended from subtleties of light to significations of character. Loyalty to his technique drew from the artist an approximation of humane wisdom that was probably far beyond his personal capacity, as a young man. This occurs with all sufficiently disciplined creative endeavors — klutzes in life transfigured as seraphim in their work — but seldom so sublimely.

— Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker (subscription required)

Vermeer appears to have stopped painting at age forty. He died three years later. There are only thirty-six authenticated Vermeers in the world. (View a highly detailed scan of this painting here.)

Filed Under: Art, Creativity Tagged With: painting, Vermeer

Eavan Boland: “Quarantine”

September 27, 2009

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking — they were both walking — north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

— Eavan Boland (via)

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Eavan Boland, poems

Barbara Mensch’s photographs of Fulton Fish Market

September 24, 2009

Mensch-Nunzio

A few weeks ago I wrote about photographer Barbara Mensch’s lovely images of New York. Barbara recently wrote to point me to another series of her photographs, this one depicting the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan, which was closed in 2005. The photographs are different from the ones that first caught my eye — grittier, more documentary and personal in style — but they are fascinating. I especially like the portraits of the men who worked in the market, like the one above, “Nunzio an Unloader” (1982).

In an email, Barbara wrote, “I am a storyteller by nature and for years I have tried to weave together visual stories and oral histories.” That sense of story, of the rich experience of this place, really comes through in these pictures. Looking at them, you imagine the whole world of the Manhattan waterfront, all the stink and clatter and damp. It’s all gone now, taking a thousand stories with it. The world is full of lost places like this, of course, which were not so fortunate as to have a Barbara Mensch to document them.

The full story behind these photos is related here. Many of the images and accompanying stories have been compiled into a book called South Street, with an introduction by Philip Lopate. Barbara Mensch’s photographs are available at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York (41 East 57th Street).

Filed Under: Photography Tagged With: New York

Throwaway novels

September 13, 2009

“The bestseller in fiction took a precipitous turn in the 1980s towards what might be termed the ‘throwaway read,’ a novel with a shelf life of yogurt.”

— Nina Siegal (via)

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: quotes

George Herbert: “Church Monuments”

September 1, 2009

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust,
To which the blast of Death’s incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines;
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust and earth with earth.
These laugh at jet and marble, put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,
And spoil the meeting: what shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps which now they have in trust?
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent, that, when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know
That flesh is but the glass which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

— George Herbert (1593-1633)

Robert Pinsky has a lovely appreciation of this poem in Slate today. You can hear Pinsky read the poem using the player below.

[jwplayer config=”Landay Audio Player” file=”http://media.slate.com/media/slate/Podcasts/poems/Church_Monuments.mp3″ /]

<a href="http://url" class="wpaudio">Artist - Song</a>

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: audio, George Herbert, poems

Wallace Stevens: “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”

August 26, 2009

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

— Wallace Stevens

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: poems, Wallace Stevens

Philip Larkin: “This Is the First Thing”

August 20, 2009

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

— Philip Larkin

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Philip Larkin, poems

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